1. Field of the Invention
This invention concerns memory array integrated circuit chips having memory for storing system processor data, and more particularly concerns such a memory array having the memory and an embedded processor on the same chip.
2. Related Art
The increasing speed and computational power of computer system processors has outpaced improvements in the speed of transferring data between processors and memory arrays. As one consequence, in an effort to keep up with the system processor's demand for data, it is even conventional to resort to speculatively transferring blocks of data to a cache near the system processor. This is done based on guesses about when is the best time to speculatively transfer the data, and what data the processor will need in the near future. For example, algorithms are used for speculative fetching which are based on locality of reference and with respect to the most recently used words, or based on identifying long sequential data strings, etc. This situation illustrates the need for improvement in data transfer between processors and memory arrays, including the need to reduce the number of data transfers on the memory-processor bus.